


Hadean-Standard Mao

by byzantienne



Category: In Nomine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-24 08:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/937633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Botch one Role and you end up with so many penalty cards in your hand that this kind of game is the best available option. </p>
<p>Forged papers, smuggled damned souls, and the politics of the down-and-out on the borders of Hades: the things Vivienne, Habbalite of the Game, has to deal with in order to get herself and her partner back out of Hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Suit on Suit, Number on Number

Madeline brings me the demonling like a kitten presenting its owner with a captured mouse: somewhat disemboweled, pleading, and accompanied by a creeping certainty that the kitten thinks you couldn't even feed yourself if she wasn't there to help.

It's morning in the grey city, or as close to morning as Hades ever gets. A lightening of the smog, a suggestion of a chilly dawn somewhere on Earth. The quiet hours, in a city where sleep is something only the damned remember as solace; that fractional pause between the winding-down of the business of the night and the winding-up of the business of the day. I am looking out the window of our apartment and thinking of snow. We have not been on the corporeal for several months, and the view from here is getting tiresome. Cinderblock apartments, narrow street, an Impudite trudging to the checkpoint on the corner, fistful of papers clutched to his chest and his uniform hanging ragged from his shoulders. I doubt he'll pass through. Dullness is a piss-poor style of play. At best it keeps you safely mired in Hades, stamping forms, sorting files.

Madeline has got the demonling caught by the scruff of its neck in her delicate teeth. It's an unformed sort of a thing, blobbish, with more limbs than it strictly needs. She spits it onto our kitchen counter and holds it still with one blue-black coil sprawled lazy across its belly, and says, "Forged passport; forged Essence-ration card; hasn't got a name or it've forged that, too. Please tell me, Vivienne, that you've got a blessed good reason for wanting it, else I'm tossing it back into the drains."

The demonling mewls when I come over. I understand its fear. I am not a pretty sight, here in Hell. The Rules are written on my flesh, inked on open wounds in even print: every one I know. Some – most – have scarred quite badly.

"Hush your weeping," I tell the demonling. It does not hush. They hardly ever do. "All we want is a little bit of information. Simple, really."

"I didn't do anything," it says. It does not have many Ethereal Forces, I suspect. A smarter demonling would not have claimed innocence, not when my partner had already stated unequivocally some of its guilt. 

"You have a forged passport," I say to it. Behind me, Madeline produces said contraband with a flourish, holds it in the crook of her wing. "And ah! It's quite a nice one. Passage to Sheol and Tartarus, unlimited reentries. Now, what I want to know is … did you purchase it from some unfortunate reprobate, or did you steal it your own self?"

"Bought it!" the demonling says immediately. Ah, the instincts of every Game-born demon, however small: implicate your neighbor first. 

"With what Essence," Madeline scoffs. "You were living in a drainpipe. A scummy drainpipe. I went down it, after you. It was dreadful and I want a shower. Passports are beyond your means."

"Spent all my Essence on the passport," the demonling retorts, "an' it was a nice pipe. Lonesome. Dark."

I lean over it. "Cleverness," I say, "is not a defense," and then I fill it full of fear. The fear that comes from my Choir's resonance is a flattening horror: a gut-rotting awareness of the immensity of the Game, a surety that you do not know the rules everyone else is playing by, the anticipation of many penalties. I have felt it myself; I learned it at the hands of the Angel of Mao. The demonling, frozen, trembles for me. But lack of movement carries penalties of its own.

"Who did you steal the passport from, kid?" Madeline asks, silken. "We're not InfPol. We don't care that you have it. Not our bailiwick, right, Vivienne? A little thing like contraband documents. Everyone has contraband documents, these days."

"But we do care," I add, "about people who _make_ contraband documents." I put one finger against the demonling's throat and tap, deliberate and slow.

It incriminates itself quite quickly after that: ugly little spill of indiscretions, starting with its habit of lurking under the stoop of a disreputable coffeehouse near the Stygian border and ending with its tendency to pickpocket larger, smarter demons exiting said locale. Its current passport is the second it's – retrieved – from that location. It has its mouth open to confess a variety of further small lawlessnesses when I get bored.

I tell it to take itself over into Stygia if it is going to persist in getting caught stealing, and toss it down the back staircase. It bounces twice, squelches once, and lurches into the shadows of the alleyway.

Madeline is drinking a cup of coffee when I get back, the mug – all patterned with clubs and spades, sheer kitsch and I will never understand her fondness for it – wrapped up in the tip of her tail. She laps at the coffee with flickers of her tongue. She has likely spent her entire Essence-ration on caffeine again; this is not my problem, unless she also spends mine.

"Fill out the interrogation paperwork, Madchen," I tell her. "We have hotbed of dissidents to visit when you're done."

"Box 17a, name of interrogated demon, 'Too Young To Have Thought Up A Good Name'…"

_"Accurately,"_ I say. "I want to get back to Earth sometime this century, don't you?"

"Accurately, in triplicate, black or red ink, I wasn't fledged yesterday..." Madeline blinks each pair of her eyes at me, amused flicker of nictitating membrane over grass-green: Balseraph arrogance. She thinks she's adorable.

I flip her off.

She kisses the back of my neck and leaves me with the dregs of her coffee.

Another morning in Hell.

* * *

We trudge the streets, two more demons in grey. We are the Game, and in Hades so is everyone else, from least-defined demonling to our Dread Prince, if he ever decided to walk these concrete mazes Himself. We are passing the Bureau of Registered and Unregistered Corporeal Artifacts, which huddles in the shadow of the more-imposing Department of Game-Related Literatures, a blackened spire with a long queue of damned souls bearing manuscripts waiting outside. The lit windows of the buildings glow red, like his eyes. No one is unwatched in Hades. Your neighbor – perhaps even your _friend,_ if you had such a treacherous object to begin with – might be InfPol, waiting to see if you break a Rule, ready to sell you your own safety from the Emerald Countess and her web of little spies.

It is best not to break Rules you know are Rules. (It is better to break no Rules. Madeline would say, _or to make your own Rules,_ but she is a Balseraph, and thus insane. Every partner has a weakness.)

The slums near the checkpoint of the Stygian gate are a bad part of a bad town. But we do not sneak, Madeline and I. We have a permit. 

Our permit allows for investigation within the borders of Hades on the specific orders of the Marquis Jahathanna, the Angel of Mao. It is much reduced in scope from previous permits we have possessed. This is an unfortunate but currently inescapable restriction on our possible lines of play. This is a game of Hadean-style Mao, botched-your-Roles Variant. Reign of twos: play only ascending number on number until you can crawl out into the light again. I miss the Corporeal. So does Madeline, though she tells herself she doesn't.

The demonling's disreputable coffeehouse has a hand-stenciled sign hanging over its front stoop, bearing the legend _The Informant Bias_ over a stylized coffee bean. The paint on the coffee bean is cracked and peeling.

"Is it pretending to be a New England pub?" Madeline asks. "Is that the fashion in Stygia now?"

"I sincerely hope we do not need to find out," I say, and shove the door open with my shoulder.

The inside of _The Informant Bias_ is a dim and smoky clutter, redolent of coffee tannins. I am unwillingly impressed: coffee that approximates the taste and scent of the Corporeal stuff is blessedly difficult to get in quantity down here. And yet this place is handing it out in little demitasse cups for half an Essence. The clientele is mostly Impudites and the chattier sort of Balseraphs. Everything is wall-niches and cushioned chairs and some damned soul wailing away on a violin in a corner. I count no less than three obvious Factions spies, and that's before we get two feet from the door.

"Madchen, get us coffee and make them put something alcoholic in mine, that soul is murdering Prokofiev and I can't stand that," I say cheerfully, and execute a gleeful flop into a half-occupied booth. The Impudites – not _obviously_ Factions – on the other side of it look displeased at me. "Oh, _hi._ Can we share your table?"

We are sharing their table regardless of their preferences. Neither of them look to have more Forces than I do and besides, they don't seem the type to make loud complaints. The left-side one is a redhead and has a coffeestain on her jacket's lapel. She leans her elbows on the table and cups her chin in her hands, saying, "You new to this side of Hades, or something?"

"Mm," I say. "Not really my usual digs, but Madchen over there wanted to try out someplace different."

"Where's usual," says the other Impudite. He holds his coffee in both palms; it is practically a vat of faintly-beige foamed milk. Some people have no taste. 

I shrug. "Watching the souls scrub the smog off the Halls of Loyalty gets tedious, let's say."

Redhead gets wide eyes, laps that right up. "Central!"

"Expensive," I correct. "So it's nice to get out from under the concrete every so often."

"How'd you end up all the way out here," her friend says. He's either more suspicious than she is – I am the only Horror in this place, and if he's got enough Ethereal Forces to remember to watch for what's unusual he might be a bit of trouble for us – or he's resentful of anyone who's got enough connections to work in central Hades coming slumming into his precious Stygia-esque hangout. I look him over: skinny jeans in intense lime, high-collared short-sleeved button-down shirt, narrow checkerboard tie. All he's missing is a trilby. Why do Impudites pick up on the most obnoxious of Earth fashions? A rhetorical question, but one which I find myself asking far too often.

"Heard about it from a friend," I tell him. "I bet you'll be getting a lot of demons making the trek out here soon – this place is just _so authentic."_

He winces. I smile brightly at him, wide enough that he can see that I have inked the first Rule I ever learned on the gums above my teeth: _there is no talking._ The wince turns into a flinch. Hipsters. So simple.

Madeline slithers up to my side, hands off a cup of coffee, and curls into a pretty spiral with her chin resting on my shoulder. "And the coffee's great," she chimes in. "How did this place ever afford the real thing?"

"If you need to ask," the hipster Impudite says, "you really don't need to know." Perhaps he does have two Ethereal Forces to rub together. So easy to underestimate people. I rest my hand between Madeline's wings and let her lead.

"Hey, I'm just _super_ interested in unusual things," my partner says. "And in artisan coffee. I'd bet the owner has Tether access, this is Earth-quality tasty. All the dry fruity notes! Ethiopian, maybe?"

Redhead Impudite shrugs like she's bored, but she's paying too much attention to convince me of _that._ "If imports are your thing, I guess it's good," she says.

"So I'm right!" Madeline is always right. "Come on, spill, honey, where's it come from? Promise I won't tell."

"I'm no Lilim," the Impudite says, amused. She looks at me. "Does she keep promises?"

I laugh. "Madchen? Do you?"

Madeline blinks only her middle pair of eyes. "About coffee, usually."

"Ugh," the hipster says. "Lorelei, this is dull, and if it isn't dull it's probably InfPol, and I do _not_ have the time." He gets to his feet. 

Redheaded Lorelei looks like she's going to protest being abandoned by her partner, so I sigh and say, "Some people, huh? So – pretentious." Lorelei focuses right back on me and Madeline. Rules for Impudites: attention is currency. Some are cheaper than others.

"Torv's been insufferable ever since he came back from Earth," Lorelei agrees. "Just 'cause he's got a Role … "

"Roles come and go," Madeline says. I wonder how much she's convinced herself of it. Of our two, her Role was the one we could have salvaged, if we'd had the right cards to play.

"You – what's your name, anyway? – you really interested in imported coffee?" Lorelei asks. 

"Call me Maddy," my partner says. "And it's more – I'm into importing. And exporting. But also coffee. Definitely coffee."

Lorelei nods, resettles her wings at a more rakish angle. "You do a lot of – importing and exporting – back near the Halls of Loyalty, then."

"That's not our official assignment," I say.

"But maybe unofficially, sometimes," Madeline adds. "If it's really good coffee."

"Or really good anything else," I continue. "Only Madchen here has the obsession with caffeine. She's practically a Technologist for how much she likes it."

Lorelei says, "If you want to talk about coffee, you go talk to the barista. But if you want to talk _importing and exporting,_ maybe you tell me what it is that you do officially."

"On Earth we were working in remote surveillance," Madeline says. "Border crossings. Intelligence analysis. Three-letter agencies."

"But now we mostly drink coffee," I say. "Lost a lot of security clearance recently."

Madeline sighs, squinching up the scales between her eyes. "I miss the espresso from that place on K Street, Vivienne. And makeup. And seeing the sun on the Mall. Being stuck in Hades is _awful."_

She's not even lying, my partner.

Lorelei says, "I know just how you feel. Hey, Maddy – you want to talk to someone about getting out for the weekend? Maybe bringing back something to keep you from feeling so … stuck?"

Madeline laps up the dregs of her coffee and flicks her tongue over her snout to catch a stray bit of foam. "Can we?" she asks me, all showy deference.

Now we reel in what we've caught. "Hell. Why not?" I say, and I take the business card that Lorelei hands us, follow her pointing finger toward one of the low cushioned booths in the back of the shop.

Shedite there; big one, slime and a thousand red eyes piled one on another, blinking slowly. Embedded in its body are ripped-out tracklines, traces of metal like the ghosts of circuitry and none of its maws have teeth, only lamprey-sucker circles. I am guessing ex-Tech. No coffee for it: it is playing poker with a pair of Balseraphs that look like they crawled out of the same batch of Forces, grey wings on grey scales. When we come over it waves them off and they scatter. 

"Lorelei send you?" it says, one word per maw, like popping bubbles.

"Mmhm," Madeline tells it. "We maybe wanted to get out of Hades a while."

"Just out?" it asks.

I pick up one of the hands of cards the Balseraphs abandoned. Half of an inside straight. It should have folded. "In and out," I say, and pass it Lorelei's card.

It digests it, the cardstock dissolving slowly in the slime of its middle. I wonder if it reads biochemically – I've seen stranger modifications on Technology's demons. "Lorelei vouches for you," it says. "Here's the deal: buy-in gets you a spot on the next run out to Tartarus. You come back successful and you don't snitch to InfPol, you get to keep the passport we give you. You go out again after that, you get cut in on the profit. You snitch, we got someone inside the Halls who'll catch you at it, haul you in first. Simple rules. Simple game. Everyone wins."

There is no game where everyone wins. 

"What're we taking to Tartarus?" Madeline asks.

"Test subjects," says the Shedite. 

"Damned souls," I clarify, for Madeline's sake. 

She rolls her eyes at me. "Squirmy cargo," she says. "Where're you getting them?"

"You buying in, kid?" the Shedite asks. "Ante up or we're done here."

"What's the buy-in," I ask.

Lamprey-maws cannot smile, just squelch and writhe around the edges. "Lorelei tells me you two used to work in surveillance, real center-city types. That true?"

Madeline nods. "True enough."

"You still got center-city contacts?"

"Who doesn't?" I say.

Some of those torn-out circuit paths light up, chemical afterimages of whatever this Shedite used to be. "Buy-in is a signed, undated Soul Yards permit," it says. "Real, not forged. If you really have the credentials you're claiming, that's easy."

It is not easy. We will need to convince Mao to let us draw more cards, and hope they aren't penalties.

"We're in," Madeline tells him. "When do you want it?"

"Dusk Essence tomorrow," says our smuggler. "Alley behind the Special Directorate for Housing the Damned. Don't be late."

That gives us thirty hours. Maybe this will be easy after all.


	2. Dealer Makes the Rules

There is no snow in Hades, only the everpresent threat of snow: what sky there is huddling oppressive over the alleyways and the wide cobblestone avenues, grey and damply chilled. It has been about to snow for as long as I remember, and I have the better part of a century behind me, but Madeline told me a story, once – that when the mortal empire of Rome ruled a third of the Corporeal, Hades was hazy and vicious with Mediterranean sun.

Perhaps it only snows when we're on Earth and not here to see. This is Hell, after all.

We are waiting in a line that curves all the way down the marble stairs that lead up to the Windows, eight stories of monumental stonework without a single actual fenestration. I saw Madeline the first time on these steps, just a dark line on the horizon: both of us stumbling out into the city holding identical assignment cards and looking for our new partners. The Windows is requisitions and personnel, and meeting on the stairs outside is traditional – find your partner, size her up, pity the poor bastards who are still waiting in the queue to have their fates decided. We are the backdrop in someone else's story today, and when the wind picks up I wish for a coat and for the furry Russian hat that the Lilim manning the entrance gate has pulled down over her ears.

"Are we really going to play this straight," Madeline asks me. The cold rolls right off her; Balseraphs might be shaped like snakes but they're not ectothermic.

"This part," I tell her.

"Queuing is for suckers and chumps," she mutters. "Come _on_ , Vivienne. Let me go talk to the Lilim, I'm sure she'll know who we are if I just – mention it a little. Aren't you bored?"

"Utterly," I say. "Profoundly. That's the point – we are suckers and chumps today. We're about to spend actual Essence and some favors I meant to keep hold of for a much rainier afternoon than this on a transparent get-rich-quick smuggling swindle."

She rolls her eyes: upper pair to the right, lower pair to the left, middle pair one of each. Showoff. "We can play easy mark without waiting in _line_."

I hold out my hands to her, fists closed. "Pick left or right."

"Are you trying to distract me?" she says. "You're better with slight of hand with your right. And you're making a point to me like I'm a barely-fledged student instead of your partner, so you want me to pick the hand with the chip in it. Left."

My left hand is empty. "You're ruining the lecture, Madchen."

"I know!" She smiles so brightly, all needle-fangs and the pink inside of her mouth with just the tip of her tongue black and visible.

I sigh and skip to the end. "First rule of being a spy is forgetting you're a spy," I say.

Madeline flickers her tonguetip against my empty palm. I have learned not to shiver. "So what's the game, Vivienne? Paper, machine, mechanical?"

"Confidence," I say.

"I thought we were suckers."

"Keep thinking it. Convince yourself, be a mark for as long as I need you to be one."

"And trust my handler, mm?"

I think of standing in the street on a perfectly ordinary spring day in a perfectly ordinary human city, and explaining to Madeline just how we'd been compromised. She'd trusted me then. "It's my plan," I say. "It won't work if you're not in all the way." A small concession, but one I can easily afford.

"None of your plans work if I'm not in all the way," Madeline says to me. "Oh! Look! We're next."

That's true. Both of those things.

The Lilim has a nameplate and a series of notices pinned to her booth. The first proclaims her to be JANE, at the WINDOWS; the second read, in sequence, _SUNGLASSES ARE DISCOURAGED, PLEASE HAVE YOUR PAPERWORK READY,_ and _ALL INQUIRIES RELATING TO THE PREVIOUS DISPERSAL OF ARTIFACTS AND TALISMANS ARE TO BE MADE DIRECTLY TO THE APPROPRIATE BUREAU (CORPOREAL, ETHEREAL, CELESTIAL)._ Pasted across that last is a slip reading _the Bureau of Ethereal Artifacts is closed for renovations have a nice day! Sincerely Jane!_

I decide I dislike Jane.

"Welcome to the Windows, how may I direct you?" she says.

"We need to see the Marquis Jahathanna," Madeline says, firmly.

"Oh, wow, big ask!" Jane says. "Do you have an appointment? Or you could fill out these forms so I could make you an appointment, if you don't have an appointment, though I'll have to ask you to go to the back of the line while you complete them." She puts an inch-high stack of paper in the booth's transaction window and shuts her side of the glass chamber firmly. "Go on, take it!" she says, gesturing for Madeline to open the door on our side.

"We need to see the Marquis Jahathanna and we would like to pay the fee for not having an appointment," I interject.

"Well you could have _said_ ," says Jane. "That'll be five Essence, plus one for expediting the appointment, plus one for the appointment being for two people, plus one redeemable if you make a second appointment within the next two weeks."

Madeline glares at me loudly enough she doesn't even need to open her mouth for me to know what she's thinking: being the mark is _expensive_. "Four from each of us," she says, "and I want the receipt for the redeemable one in writing!"

"We've got a form for that," Jane says cheerfully – of course she does, there is in fact a form for everything – but she hands it over when Madeline passes her our Essence. We're going to spend days having to be careful with expenditures and hoping we don't need to pull off anything especially lucky or impressive. We've dealt with worse. This is the price of playing the opening act of this game as cleanly as we can.

I sign Jane's paperwork and she stamps our passports with temporary entries. Ten thousand border crossings in Hades, if you're acting like a tourist or a prole. We're in Jahathanna's territory now; she shares the Windows with Chess and Go, but our entry-stamps have got Mao's deck-of-cards sigil front and center.

(Chess is predictable: black king, crowned with an eye. Go is _old_ : ladder of black and white stones, alternating, no winner stretching into infinity.

There is a Demon of Poker, but he works for Theft this century. Officially, at least.)

Jahathanna keeps her office on the eighth floor, in the corner. If there were windows in the Windows two of her walls would look out on the city: as it is they are smooth, pale marble, translucent in the light like a frame for her desk. The left wall is a relic, built into the stone – what I think is the song of Ethereal Light, fading the marble to transparency and showing what the window _ought_ to be. I've only seen it open once, when I was a much smaller Horror, Jahathanna standing behind me and pointing out the black-glass glint of the Styx, the tiny eyespot boats full of the damned, crossing under the eyes of the Game into Hell. Her hands were cool on my shoulders, and she was kind, and I was full of false serenity which I knew she'd given me as a gift. Then she gave me Madeline, and I knew why the serenity had been false.

She is not so gracious today, but then I am coming in here with my hand stuffed full of useless cards and asking to _draw again_.

I stay silent while she finishes whatever she is working on and deigns to look up at Madeline and me. First rule. Easiest rule to keep and easiest rule to forget. The Marquis is a tall Habbalite, narrow like a knife, tattooed in ink across her cheeks: all four suits, curving like an extension of a smile from mouthcorner to temples. She is not smiling now.

"If this is a report on the contraband passport manufacting, you had no reason to pay for an appointment, Vivienne," she says.

Direct question. There is no talking, but the dealer makes the rules. "It's not a report on the passports," I say. "We paid because I meant us to pay."

"You're squandering your resources."

"On purpose!" Madeline says. "The game is confidence, Marquis."

My words in her mouth: I will never be dissatisfied with that, no matter what Jahathanna thinks of my partner speaking out of turn.

" _You_ certainly have enough of it," Jahathanna says, her long fingers tapping on the inset marble of her desk – two shades darker than the walls – soft, clicking, evaluative. "Vivienne, the object of the game?"

Ritual question, ritual response, and both of us know this one: "To get rid of all our cards," we say, a two-demon chorale, and then I get down to specifics.

"Passports are paying the overhead for a soul-smuggling operation, Marquis. From the players, I'd say it's dissidents and refuseniks who like shiny toys – destination's Tartarus, recruiting pool is Stygia-side slums and anyone who looks like they've recently been worked over by higher-ups. People who have played badly. People who'll play badly again."

"People carrying a lot of penalties," Maddy says. "Like us."

"Except we know it," I say. "My hand's full of information but I can't play any cards, Marquis. I need to draw again."

Her eyes narrow, and I am disgusted with myself, nauseated with itchy awareness of every unmarked stretch of my skin, clammy with the horror of my shortcomings. I want to get on my knees and weep. I want to spill my guts on the marble with a knife. I want to be anyone but this weak creature, not even knowing how to play my own hand without _help_ –

Shaking off Jahathanna's resonance isn't the point. The point is enduring it. The point is not ripping my stomach open with my own nails while she watches. The point is proving I am not what I think I am under her eyes --

Hell's grey city does not encourage trust: the stakes are too steep and the rewards too easily squandered or traded away. Trusting your partner: dangerous. Trusting your teacher, your superior, even your Prince: necessary, and dangerous. What there is to trust fully is that there _are_ Rules. There is a pattern, a systematic and comprehensible knowledge. Heaven's angels call it the Symphony, and say God wrote it. Angels serving here in Hell know better: the Symphony's a Game, the Rules are a structure, and they're _unfair_ , they say _dealer makes the rules_ they say _get down on your knees_ they say _you can't win_ –

You play by the rules, in the grey city. And then you play better than the rules.

I say, "Penalty accepted, Marquis, _thank you_ –"

Jahathanna's expressionless as a Djinn – do all of us Gamesters end up looking like our Prince, eventually? – but she waves a hand, little go-on gesture.

I say, "I want to draw a card." I am going to have to get through this whole meeting while wanting to jump into the Lethe in horror at _what I am_. But I have it at a distance, now, I know it's the penalty that I took, I know that I could induce it myself: the current state of the field says _Vivienne, Habbalite of the Game, believes she is so worthless she is like to die_ but it's _believes –_ and my partner is a Balseraph. I know all about _belief_.

Jahathanna shrugs. "Specific card, or you want whatever's on top of the deck?"

"What's the cost on specific?" Madeline asks. She doesn't look like she's been hit with emotion like a cutting torch – either she shook it off or Jahathanna only wants _me_ to know how badly I've played, how disgustingly low I have become.

"Cost on specific is you _also_ take what's on top of the deck," says Jahathanna. Which means what's easily available is something she thinks I can't handle, something we'll have to prove we can work with.

"Deal!" Madeline says. I want to shut my eyes and let her answer all the questions; but that is never a good idea.

"Deal," I say, "and our specific is an official Soul Yards permit, signed, undated, not a forgery, the actual object, indistinguishable from true." I'm talking too much.

"A prop for your con," Jahathanna says, and she might sound approving, though I can't tell right now. "Granted; it'll be delivered to your apartment by Dusk Essence."

"Thank you, Marquis," I say.

Madeline's coiled up in a tight spiral, wings drawn close around her, all six eyes fixed on Jahathanna and I want at least one pair on me. "Okay. Random draw," my partner says.

When Jahathanna grins, her tattoos make her gape like a shark. "Penalty. Playing out of turn, Madeline."

"I wasn't –" Madeline says, all her eyes widening, the pupils dilating to manic slits.

"Penalty. Talking," Jahathanna says, and they _stack_ , that's the problem with Mao, she just – keeps going –

Madeline wraps her wings over her mouth and her eyes both, and shivers, and stills.

"Point of order," I say, and I don't choke on the words.

Jahathanna says, "Granted."

"She's not out of turn."

"It's your draw, Vivienne. She's out of turn."

"She's not out of turn because she's my partner, Marquis."

"Does she speak for you?"

This is getting more dangerous all the time. The Corporeal was kinder; the Corporeal only had angels to dodge and fool and Renegades to spy on, not Wordbound demons who taught me the Rules and never want me to forget. "She speaks for me when I want her to," I say.

"Madeline," Jahathanna says. "Madeline, do you want a card?"

"—Madchen," I say. "Go on, now."

Jahathanna reaches into her desk and pulls out a small box. "Little card. Not so important," she says, holding it out. Madeline takes it between her teeth, ginger and still shivering. "You're headed to Tartarus, on your con. You hand that over to someone who'll hand it right on up to the Genius Archangel. Simple game. Get rid of the card in your hand."

"Simple game," Madeline echoes.

"And as for you, Vivienne, the card on the top of the deck. Take the demon who'll deliver your Soul Yards permit and bring him with you when you run your little game. Teach him the Rules. And don't let him run off anywhere exciting."

 _Hell_. Not what we need. Not what we need at all. But it could be worse, I've dealt with Jahathanna's younger pets before, they're usually quiet enough to begin with --

"Thank you, Marquis," I say. Ritual. Ritual is safe.

When we stumble out of the Windows, it is still not snowing, and Madeline is wrapped around my shoulders like a Balseraphic scarf, cool scales pressed against my cheek and making me shiver as hard as she is.


	3. Everyone Begins With Eight Cards

I turn on all the lamps in our apartment, one after the other, even though there's enough light coming in through the windows to satisfy any reasonable desire for illumination. The switch on the standing lamp beside the couch is tricky. I turn the clickwheel and get no response. I turn the clickwheel and get flickers and sparks. This is what happens when a Principality imports its electricity from Vapula. I turn the clickwheel and the bulb glows, dim under its red shade.

"Happy now?" Madeline asks me. She's curled into the corner of the couch, a pile of tightly-wrapped coils, curled in on herself and still shivering, still.

"No," I say. "Why would I be happy about staggering back from the Windows like a pair of Force-stripped pawns? You cling. Half of the city thinks we're in disgrace."

She says, "You wanted to believe you were a spy." I wish she was pouting at me; Madeline being insouciant is Madeline at her scheming best, and I need that if we're going to run this con backwards on the demons who are trying to con _us_.

"That doesn't mean I'm happy about it. And I'm even less happy about taking along a blind third."

Madeline shudders. "We going to read him in?"

"I haven't decided yet," I say.

"Decide or I will," she says, "and you won't like it either way I pick –"

I cut her off. "We don't even know what he is yet. Whether he's useful or stupid. Be patient, Madchen."

She snickers, cut-glass sound, chilly and distant like the smash of a bottle in another room. "Mao gave him to us, what do you _think_ he's going to be?"

"Luck of the draw, is what. We play the hand we're dealt."

"You're always awful after we go talk to her," she tells me. "Scared. Scared stiff and dull and by-the-book. Have to shake you up all over again."

She'll convince me if I let her. Mostly I let her.

"Vee," Madeline says. She never calls me anything but Vivienne unless she wants something from me or we're in bed – she never calls me anything but Vivienne unless she wants something from me. Now she stretches out a wing, cool leather wrapped around my waist, vivid with tremors, and pulls me in. "Vee, fix me, won't you?"

I settle my hands on the struts of her wings, feel the delicate bones curled under my palms. The ink cut into my hands is the same shade as her scales, or she's the same color as the ink, one or the other. "What'd she hit you with?" I ask. It's got to be one of the subtle ones, to last this long and leave Madeline this functional underneath it.

She coils upward, leans her head on my sternum between my breasts. "Fear but not terror," she says, very soft now. "Fear like uncertainty. Like if I move I'll fall. Like every play is a bad play. Fix it, Vee. I hate when anyone gets through but you."

My partner. Lovely, and insane, and when she's as weak as any other demon she knows to ask me for help. "Hush now," I say. "Everything's fine."

Because we Habbalah are angels, even serving in Hell, we can see into hearts, though it's like looking through a scrim, difficult and risky; but because we serve in Hell, even though we are angels, we can _change_ hearts. Show people how to feel. What Jahathanna's done to Madeline is just a localized shift in the rules the Symphony is operating by. I could resonate her Empty, my Madchen, set everything back to neutral, but that's not what she asked me for, that's not what she needs. Instead I reach out into the world and I impose _my_ rules. I feel what I'm making Madeline feel, before she feels it. It passes through me at a distance, something I craft, a reflection in the polished surface of a chessboard: euphoria, the sweet kind, serene and helplessly overwhelming. The feeling of listening to the rain on Earth in September, the whole corporeal world racing toward a crystalline winter.

Madeline sighs, and shudders, and goes gloriously limp in my arms.

"Better?" I ask.

"Mmm," she says. "Mm, Vivienne, go away now, it's like floating, this is nice." She doesn't pull free, though; she slides forward, upward, languidly coiling, thick loops of her flowing through my arms. Any other time I'd let her tangle me up, spill us onto the couch, convince me of anything she wants me to believe.

But we have a game to play.

I pour her back down onto the cushions. "I'm going out to get us supplies, Madchen," I say. "Don't wander off."

She giggles. "I never wander off. You just lose track of me. You should have been a Djinn like our Prince."

"Then all I'd be able to do is keep track of you, and you wouldn't feel so nice." I run the pad of my index finger up between her eyes. The scales there are very small and fine. "Be useful if you can bear to be, and if Jahathanna's present gets here before I get back, convince him we're the nicest, friendliest sort of demons, won't you?"

"Aren't we?" Madeline says. "I thought we were!"

"We're the Game."

"Exactly so." She leans her chin on the armrest of the couch, flicks her tailtip at me languidly. "Go already, Vivienne. Don't we have a con to run? Or do you want me do convince you to stay and play with me?"

"Threats, Madchen?"

"You're my handler," she says. "If I can't threaten you, who can I threaten?"

* * *

I end up in the street alone and somehow feeling as if I'm the one who just got herself resonated into a puddle, rather than Madeline. I turn the collar of my trenchcoat up against the wind. In the next apartment block over a Calabite and a Shedite are being arrested by InfPol, Will-Shackled and netted and bundled into the back of a sleekly anonymous black car by a wolf-monkey of a Djinn. His driver is a Lilim, scanning the street behind mirrored sunglasses. I don't meet her eyes. I pay no attention. I do not want to know. It is safest to not know, to say nothing and notice nothing, when InfPol is on your street.

I hurry. I feel the gaze of that Lilim between my shoulderblades until I am two streets away and cutting through an alley, as if I've been pinned to a board like a moth.

Fate's Archive hunkers on the edge of Hades like the hulking corpse of some millennia-dead leviathan. It is visible around corners and between buildings, a premonition of monumental architecture. Even with InfPol crawling the streets, Hades is never still, never silent. It schemes and it plays games and it crawls with demons and damned. But the quarter of the Grey City which is closest to Kronos's realm grows quieter the farther into it I walk. I stop thinking of incipient snowfall and begin thinking of trudging through ever-increasing dust. The only reason I come this way at all is that some of my acquaintances have the poor taste to live all the way out here.

I arrive at Csenge's rowhouse – identical to every other rowhouse on this block, low and grey and institutional without even a filigree of ironwork in suit-shapes or other Game symbolism my partner would get gleeful over. Each rowhouse is numbered. The numbers are very long. Fate is an organized Word, and Csenge an obedient Servitor. Her number is 47892189X3VL9. I memorized it once, before she'd managed to collect a Role and a name, and was just the Impudite of Fate I spent a very long month in the Archives with when we were both small, playing a slow game of closing legal loopholes and learning a very particular sort of patience. The patience the Archive instills is very useful for surveillance. Or anything else that requires being quite still.

I knock, and hope Csenge isn't on the Corporeal. I have other sources for going-out-of-Hades supplies, but they'll all ask more questions.

The peephole slots open with a thunk. Csenge's eyes peer through, narrowed, ice-pale irises expanding in the light coming in from the street. Some Fate demons never learn the trick of emerging into the relative brightness of the city.

"Let me in," I say.

Csenge sighs, a rasp. The door creaks open. She's a ghost on the threshold, narrow through the waist and hip, dressed in a shift that's leeched of all colors until it's settled into convenient Game-grey. She barely comes up to my shoulder. On Earth she's a gamine, giant eyes in an aristocratic Bavarian face with a string of minor diplomats at her beck and call. She's kept most of the vessel-seeming here in Hades.

"Dear Vivienne," she says. "What brings you all the way out here alone? I thought you were in D.C."

"I was," I say. "Now I'm not. I thought you were in Budapest."

Csenge slides out of my way and disappears into the gloom of her apartment, waving one hand at me to follow. "No, you didn't. You'd have gone to Budapest if you thought I was in Budapest."

"Your opinion of my relentlessness is forever encouraging."

"I live surrounded by Gamesters. It is inevitable that I would become used to the more predictable of your habits."

There is hardly any furniture in these low-ceilinged rooms; Csenge takes her work home with her instead, lines her floor with filing-boxes and other, more mysterious storage containers. They are not labeled, but if I was so callous as to move one of them, Csenge would know. Sometimes I think the woman ought to have fledged Djinn instead of Impudite. She does not offer me tea and I do not sit at her table. We have been on better terms than we currently are.

"I'm looking for some supplies," I say.

"There are many requisition kiosks," Csenge notes, "and even an entire Bureau of Personnel, for which, if I am not mistaken, you are employed."

"And if I wanted _official_ , Game-sanctioned supplies, Csenge, I would not have come to you."

She smiles with just the corners of her mouth, and I can suddenly imagine how she charms humans: to get an entire smile from her must be like the bloom of a rare and fragile flower. "Any such supplies I might provision will of course be signed out from the Archive," she says.

I shake my head. "You owe me," I say, "for what Madeline and I did for you in clearing customs across the Atlantic, and for that politician we sent to you."

"The – mm. The former champion of emissions testing," Csenge says. "I remember."

"How did he turn out?"

"It is such a shame, the concessions that must be made to car manufacturing companies. But the economy requires their investments, and young politicians are so sensitive to the application of lobbyist incentives, don't you think?" She says these things to me with a straight face; and whoever could say that Fate has no sense of humor? Aside from Kobalites.

I say, "I will admit you do excellent work," and get that flicker of a smile again. Impudites require gentle infusions of praise and attention to manage, much like the humans they so closely resemble.

"I may owe you, Vivienne, I admit it. But I don't owe you enough to lie to my Prince for you. Fate will remember what you borrowed. There will even be paperwork."

"Paperwork gets lost so often," I say.

"Especially in the Archive," Csenge agrees. "The Halls of Loyalty are _so_ much more efficient. Don't you think?"

"There is a reason I work for the Game," I say, and square up some of the files strewn over her table. Her shoulders twitch, watching me, and she comes up to my elbow and bats my hands out of the way.

"Supplies, my dear Horror," she says, briskly. "What do you want? Ask for something good, because this will render us even again."

"Reliquaries," I say, and I grin. " _Really gaudy ones_ , if you've got them. Shields would be best. And sets of clothing."

Csenge opens the lid of one of her boxes and an overpowering scent of sandalwood and lurid, overcooked meat emerges from it while she rummages. "Which Realm?"

"Celestial."

"And what _kind_ of clothing, Vivienne, specifics, please. If I am outfitting you and Madeline for a costume ball in Shal-Mari, you will have to pay, no matter how long we've known each other and what you've done for me."

"What you'd wear if you were a six-Force demonling with delusions of running a street gang," I say. "Knockoff streetwear."

"You will look absurd."

"That is, Csenge, the precise aim of the game."

* * *

I leave with an oblong package tucked under my arm, tied neatly with string and wrapped in brown paper; trekking home through the slow-emptying streets I look like a deliverywoman or a gun smuggler. I have cajoled Csenge out of one last present, and perhaps tipped the scales of our longstanding fencing match slightly in her favor again: hidden in my trenchcoat are a pair of Will-Shackles which have never been registered to any Gamester. They burn in my inside pocket like an unplayed wildcard, all potential.

I am beginning to think we might indeed have a chance at playing this con _well_ when I reopen the door to our apartment and discover that my partner is sitting at our kitchen table, still high on my resonance, and playing cards with a Djinn.

I should never have gone shopping.

"Call," says the Djinn. He hasn't spotted me yet; he's facing Madeline, who has her chin flopped on the table and her hand fanned out in front of her, clutched in her tailtip. She bats her eyelashes – at me or at him, I cannot tell.

"Vivienne!" she says, all delight, "This is Afanasiy, he brought us our permit! And he is very terrible at bluffing. I found this out for you."

The Djinn turns around and regards me with a lizard's slit-pupiled eyes in a simian face. He has scales scattered in the fur on his cheeks, like he is continuously molting. Somehow he has crammed the low-slung shoulders of a komodo dragon and the narrow hips of a monkey into an impeccable suit of perfect grey worsted-wool, complete with a white silk pocket-square. He has either money or a patron with money, this one; I wonder where Jahathanna dug him up, and why she wants me to civilize him.

"Did you win all his Essence or ought we keep playing?" I ask my partner.

Madeline sighs. "He didn't bet Essence."

I sit down next to the Djinn, and smile at him with all my teeth. "What did you bet?"

"Questions," he says. "You know, win a hand, ask a question, guy you beat has to answer."

"He worked with a Lilim last," Madeline says. "That was the first question I won."

I say, "Not surprised, if he bets questions."

Madeline's fangs show when she smiles for an audience. "After that, he likes chess best – I know, I know! – and the color yellow, and he doesn't have a vessel, and he once went to Stygia on a dare but he was a bitty demonling and hardly remembers it. He says."

I laugh. "Afanasiy," I say, "what did you learn about Madchen?"

He crosses his arms over his chest, sulkily. "Not to bet questions."

"Good boy," I say. "First rule. She's smarter than you, and don't ever let how sweet she is fool you different."

"That's not the first rule," he says, hunching his shoulders. "First rule's no talking."

"Oh, _think_ about it," Madeline says, "haven't you played variants yet?"

"Be nice, Madchen," I say. "I brought you a present." I untie Csenge's package and pull out a Balseraphic-style pendant necklace. This one is as gilded and hideous as something pulled out of Mammon's gullet, a giant nine-pointed star on a gold chain.

"Why did you get me bling?" Madeline says plaintively.

"Because it's a reliquary and you insist on not knowing any Songs that work on this plane of existence. And because –" I look at Afanasiy, who seems to be hoping that he will also receive a present, "it suits who you are right now."

Best the Djinn not know the details of the con; the less he knows, the more we can use him to disguise our lines of play. Madeline noses at her bling, and then slips it on to rest at her throat. I do up the clasp. Her scales are blood-warm now, and I am somewhat comforted, even if the necklace does the exact opposite of suit her.

"For you," I say to Afanasiy, "I have a t-shirt." The t-shirt reads, in enormous dripping Gothic captials, YOLO. He scowls at it, and then puts it on when I glare at him. "Stand up," I say. "Spin around. Hm. Lose the suit-pants, you don't match."

Madeline helps. Afanasiy doesn't react to her helping, for which I award him a modicum of points.

Denuded of pants, Afanasiy is the spitting image of a Djinn with delusions of grandeur and the risk management skills of a human teenager, which is approximately how I am thinking of him anyway. "Don't pout," I say. "It's a talisman. Should make you slightly more competent at hitting things."

"What are _you_ going to wear," Afanasiy says.

I pocket the remaining small items in the package, and remove the last of the clothing: a giant puffy coat and a pair of leather leggings, all in perfect Game colors, grey and red. "These," I say. "Put away the cards, children, I am going to get changed. And then we have some smugglers to meet."


	4. Pass and Draw A Card

Lorelei and Torv are waiting for us under the eaves of one of the tenements around the back side of the Soul Yards, exactly on schedule. Torv slouches against the brick behind his thick-framed glasses, but Lorelei darts forward and actually kisses Madeline on each cheek when she catches sight of us.

"Maddy!" she exclaims, "I was hoping you would make it."

"Never doubt me," Madeline says.

"Wouldn't for a minute," says Lorelei. Her eyes are no wider than their previous wideness; either she has no practice in disbelieving a Balseraph or she's very, very used to convincing one that they've been believed. "Hey, Vivienne! Who's the kid?"

Afanasiy's haunches go all the way up to his ears. I laugh. "New friend. Thought he could use the dime tour of Hell." 

"You going to keep a leash on him?" Torv says from his slump against the wall. He is professionally unenthusiastic, which is a peculiar but effective look on an Impudite. He shoves himself more upright and snaps his wings to drape across his shoulders, coming towards us. "He is not part of the package you bought, Horror."

"Oh, but he is," I say. "He's part of the package because I have your entry ticket to the Yards and you're not going to turn me away now, are you?" I pull the signed and dated requisition form from the inside of my ridiculous jacket and flip it between my fingers like I'm dealing from the middle of the deck.

Torv doesn't take it. "At least you came through on that," he says.

"We showed up, didn't we?" Madeline says. She's looped a familiar coil over Lorelei's shoulders already, and Afanasiy's eyebrows are as high as the holes where his ears would be if he was slightly more mammalian, looking at her. She blinks bright eyes at him and I bare my teeth in a gum-exposing grin. No talking necessary. 

My partner's got the friendly Taker, which leaves me with the sullen one and the Djinn. There are already too many players in this con, and I doubt we're safe from picking up further hangers-on – even if I discount the Shedite back in his lair in the back of _The Informant Bias_. Someone here has to know the way to Tartarus, and I've got my doubts on it being either of these two.

"Where do we pick up the cargo?" Afanasiy says. "And what _is_ the cargo, is anyone going to mention that."

"Not to you," Madeline says sweetly. "Though I bet it'll be obvious once we've got it."

Lorelei draws herself up to her full height and makes a valiant attempt at looking like she is in command of this little group of fallen pawns, despite the ever-so-friendly Balseraph sprawled on her shoulder. "Vivienne, you've got the permit. Torv's got the contact on the inside of the Yards. You two go pick up the cargo, march it out the south gate. We'll be waiting by the docks." She pauses and wrinkles her nose at me. "Why didn't you wear a suit? I thought you were central-city."

"And I thought we were leaving the city altogether," I say. But this is still the set-up for the con; I am a rube, I am a mark, I have made a glaring and obvious and distracting error. I shrug out of the puffy coat and hand it to Afanasiy, leaving me in a tank top that exposes a minute list of regulations regarding border crossings, written under my collarbones. Afanasiy stares. "But if you don't like it, I won't wear it in."

"We want to get served, not tossed out on our asses," Torv says. The child is wearing lime-green jeans. I could, in other circumstances, make a pointed comment.

"They'd serve me anyway," I say, huffy like a cat that's been pet the wrong way. "It's my permit."

"Of course, of course," Lorelei says. "Go on. Maddy and the Djinn and I will be waiting!"

"At the docks," Madeline says, just the hint of a question in her voice. 

Lorelei nods. "How else did you think we were getting out of Hades?" Torv nods, and stalks off towards the perimeter of the Soul Yards, waving a hand at me to follow. I do.

Behind us, I hear my partner confess, "I like boats," gleeful, like she's sharing a secret.

* * *

When I worked in the Archive, I recopied a book on the psychogeography of Hades, written by a Calabite of Fate in the early eighteenth century, as humans count time. The maps in it are useless now – Hell's is a volitional geography at the best of times – but the landmarks have remained the same. Thus, when Torv leads me into the enclosed bazaar which is the Soul Yards, I am expecting something out of the worst excesses of the Atlantic slave trade: souls corralled in pens, less useful Habbalah than I carrying whips, the torment of being treated like cattle, reduced to nothing but some demon's idea of value. We who serve in Hell reflect and refine what the humans do to one another; it is part of our nature and our purpose. If humans were kind, Hell would be empty.

Instead we spill into a wide hall entirely made of queues and waiting rooms delineated by waist-high barriers. The damned carry paperwork in staggering amounts. Their handlers – indeed, less useful Habbalah than I – bear clipboards and stacks of forms. With exquisite slowness, the queues sort themselves by type and kind. 

A soul still wearing the suit she died in – a lawyer or some other corporate thug, half her thorax crushed by impact and her mental image of herself not yet caught up to _dead_ rather than _dying in a car accident_ \-- arrives at the front of the nearest queue, and hands over her paperwork. The Djinn she speaks to shakes its wolflike jaws, points out six discrepancies in an audible hiss, directs her to the back of the next queue. Flickering neon signage above our heads informs us that all those souls bearing form X-157B must return to Gate 9 and replace it with form X-157Q, and that those souls who believe themselves to have committed only venial sins should wait for processing in Area D-6. I suspect it will not make much of a difference, which area they wait for processing within; all the souls here are already damned. Nevertheless, I can acknowledge that there is something to the old tradition of inflicting suffering through hope of clemency. It is a good first lesson for Hell.

There's no ceiling in the Soul Yards. Somewhere up above us, the only angels in Hell who are not members of my Choir watch over the damned and do nothing at all about them: Final Judgment, silent and statuesque. I have never seen them intervene to save a single human. Judges are as poor at clemency as we are in the Game; they merely pretend otherwise.

Torv catches my elbow. I shake him off. He holds up his hands, palms, out, an exasperated _if you insist_.

"Are we going to have to queue," I ask him.

Torv sighs. "Who doesn't have to queue?"

We queue. We queue in an endlessly winding line of demons, none of whom have pressed uniforms or properly-put-together suits, slowly trudging towards Requisition Platform Aleph. I grit my teeth and think about the process of assuming new identities, and not about how I look precisely like I belong with this sort of bottomfeeding riffraff. Then I think about the Vivienne who would be standing in this queue with her dubious new friend, hoping that a scheme in souls would buy her back into the good graces of someone – anyone – high enough in Hadean politics to send her back to Earth where she belongs. I am almost her. Almost.

Torv is doing something conspicuous, adjusting his trilby on his horns and shuffling his feet and in general making a nuisance of himself. He asks a passing soul if he can borrow a pen. He asks another Impudite in the next queue over out for a drink, which he sensibly refuses. The demons in front and behind us mutter, and a little pool of space grows around us, a hiccup in the line.

Soon enough we've attracted the attention of some sort of supervisory creature, a Calabite of middling height and middling features, his gloved hands dusty with the somewhat insubstantial blood of the damned and holding a clipboard like he's used to using it as a blunt weapon. Following him, papers pressed to their chests, just as tied to him as if he'd had them on a Will-Shackle'd chain, are a small clutch of damned; six or seven of them, all adults, all already settled into a self-image that doesn't bear much trace of their process of dying.

"Torv," the Calabite says. "You again. You keep making trouble in the lines."

I look at Torv, and arch one eyebrow. This is the plan? This extremely transparent ruse? 

Torv snorts. "I'm just waiting here, Azug. Like I'm supposed to. C'mon." He is exceptionally petulant. It may be his best skill.

"I'm too busy for this," the Calabite goes on. "I've got all these souls to process. See?"

Torv looks them over. "That's it?" he asks.

"What, you think I should have more?"

The other demons in our queue are beginning to pay far too much attention to us. "My friend here didn't mean that," I interrupt. "I'm sure those are excellent souls. _Right,_ Torv?"

Azug says, "Bunch of perfectly good souls, all died in accidents, no medical traumas, no computer science background – one of 'em was a professor of literature, wonder what _she_ did to hit her Fate, huh?"

"Modern literature about the plight of the suburban white male," I say.

Azug and Torv give me matching glances of blank confusion.

"Perfectly good souls," I say. "Sure."

"Well, I think this queue is outrageous," Torv says. "I've a permit and everything. A demon ought to be allowed a certain amount of dignity when he's filled out the proper paperwork and observed all the protocols."

Azug smiles, unpleasantly. One of the souls – not the professor of literature – cringes. "This is the Game, kid," he says. "You're making life difficult for law-abiding demons. It's not civic."

"I properly observed the protocols –" Torv protests, and then Azug closes his non-clipboard hand around his wrist and bodily pulls him from the queue.

"I think you ought to be questioned," he says. Then he points at me. "You too. You can speak to his character."

And just like that, we are arrested. It is such a simple thing, and so easily accomplished. One merely must fill out the paperwork afterward.

* * *

Arrested, in this case, means shuffled into a tiny room which actually has a roof and which is far too small for three demons and seven damned. There are a total of two chairs. I take neither of them. The souls huddle gratifyingly far from me, though 'far' in this particular case implies 'pressed up against the rear wall with their elbows nearly in Torv's wings'.

"So where's the permit," Azug asks.

"Horror's got it," Torv says.

I fish it out. "Signed, undated, and not filled in," I say. "As ordered. Do I even want to know what you're going to do with it?"

Azug is quite threatening when he's pleased. His teeth are points. "Nope," he says. "Just a little internal business. Souls're yours, take 'em out the back, they're all accounted for already."

Torv frowns. "They still in the system?"

One of the damned finds her voice, sputters, "I've filled out paperwork for days, I damn well am in your fucking system –"

"Not anymore, sweetheart," Azug says. "You're processed. All done. Gone. Like you never even died. Little ghosts in the machine."

"But I did die," says the soul. She was middle-aged when she died, wide-mouthed and tallish for a human woman, freckled across the dark skin of her nose and cheekbones. "I did, and if I'm going to be punished for my sins I am going to be punished for mine and nobody else's –"

"Hush," I tell her. "Where you are going is punishment enough for anyone." This is undoubtedly true, if lacking specificity.

Azug is more direct; he knocks the soul backwards with a sweep of the clipboard. "They're clean. You can have 'em. Like they never existed, yeah?"

"It's not breaking a rule if you found a loophole," Torv agrees. "Give our friend his permit, Vivienne."

I do. "Don't crease it," I say. "It was expensive."

Azug shoves it in his inside jacket pocket. "'course it was, Horror."

If this was my con I would resonate these souls into subservient adoration and hit Azug with something worse, like a visit from the Warden of the Soul Yards. But this is not my con. I'm the money. "Are we un-arrested yet?" I ask.

"Sure," says Azug. "See you around." He flings the door of our little interrogation cubicle wide, and Torv stalks through it. "Go on," Azug says to the souls. "He's got your paperwork now. He's taking you where you need to go. You can just leave all those forms right here." He coaxes. It nevertheless takes some effort to get the professor of literature and one of the male souls to give up their forms. Even the damned cling to stability if they can get it.

In the chaos of the queues, Torv and I keep our little collection of live cargo trapped between us, walking in pairs with the spare seventh at the front. Torv knows the way out; a back corridor clearly marked with Hellglyph signage. We are not the only escorts for souls, but I'd wager we are the only set who have not requisitioned them through protocol channels. The majority of the others wear the sigils of their Princes, or in one gaudy case, a press pass with the name of a Perdition film company clipped to his top hat. I wonder how often Torv has done this before, and when exactly it was that Azug upped the ante to _payment in illegal documentation_. 

This is a bad business. There are too many players in it. And as of yet, none of them will turn state's evidence on any of the others.

Madeline and I have a lot of work to do.


End file.
